“Too funny. He made the cartoon of Lamurk, remember? Made Lamurk look like a blowhard. It was the hit of the reception.”
Hari blinked. “You don’t…”
“Quite orderly, both of you in one day.”
“So it could be Lamurk…”
Dors said grimly, “My dear Hari, always thinking in terms of probabilities.”
After his audience with Cleon, Hari had sat through a strict talk by the head of palace security. His Specials squad was doubled. More midget-flyers for forward perimeter warning. Oh, yes, and he was not to walk close to any walls.
This last bit had made Hari chuckle, which did not improve the palace staffs attitude. Worse, Hari knew that he still had baggage to unpack. How to keep them from sniffing out Dors’ true nature?
The autoserver rang. He sat and forked up dark meat and onions and then opened another bottle of the cold beer and held it in one hand while he ate with the other.
“A hard day’s work,” Dors said.
“I always eat heartily after narrowly averting death. It’s an old family tradition.”
“I see.”
“Cleon ended up by commenting on the impasse in the High Council. Until that’s resolved, no vote on the First Minister can occur.”
“So you and Lamurk are still butting heads.”
“He’s butting. Me, I’m dodging.”
“I will never leave your side again,” she said firmly.
“It’s a deal. Could you get me something more from the autoserver? Something warm and heavy and full of things that are bad for me?”
She went into the kitchen and he ate steadily and drank the beer and did not think about anything.
She brought back something steaming in a rich brown sauce. He ate it without asking what it was.
“You are an odd man, professor.”
“Things get to me a bit later than other people.”
“You learned how to delay thinking about them, reacting to them, until there was a time and a place.”
He blinked and drank some more beer. “Could be. Have to think about it.”
“You eagerly eat working-class food. And where did you learn this trick of deferring reactions?”
“Um. You tell me.”
“Helicon.”
He thought about that. “Urn, the working class. My father got into trouble and there were plenty of hard times. About the only break I got as a boy was not getting brain fever. We couldn’t have afforded any hospital time.”
“I see. Financial trouble, I remember you saying.”
“Financial and then people muscling him to sell his land. He didn’t want to. So he mortgaged more and planted more crops and followed his best judgment. Every time chance played out against him, Dad got right back up and went at it again. That worked for a while because he did know farming. But then there was a big market fluctuation and he got caught and lost everything.” He was speaking quickly as he ate, and he didn’t know why but it felt right.
“I see. That was why he was doing that dangerous job-”
“Which killed him, yes.”
“I see. And you dealt with that. Submerged it to help your mother. learned in the hard times that followed to reserve your reactions for a moment when it was all right to let it go.”
“If you say ‘I see’ again, I won’t let you watch later when I take a shower.”
She smiled, but then the same penetrating cast came over her face. “You fit some well-defined parameters. Men who are contained. They control themselves by letting very little in. They do not show a great deal or talk too much.”
“Except to their woman.” He had stopped eating.
“You have little time for small talk-people at Streeling comment on that-yet you speak freely with me.”
“I try not to blather.”
“Being male is complicated.”
“So is being female, though you’ve mastered it beautifully.”
“I’ll take that as a rather formal compliment.”
“And so it was. Just plain being human is just plain hard.”
“So I am finding. You…learned all this on Helicon.”
“I learned to deal with essentials.”
“Also to hate fluctuations. They can kill you.”
He took a swig of the beer, still cold and biting. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“Why didn’t you say all this in the first place?”
“I didn’t know it in the first place.”
“A corollary, then: If you commit yourself to a woman you give away as much of yourself as you can, inside that enclosed space.”
“The volume between the two of us.’
“A geometric analogy is as good as any.” The tip of her tongue made her lower lip bulge out slightly, as it always did when she pondered a point. “And you commit yourself wholly to averting the price life exacts.”
“The price of…fluctuations?”
“If you can predict, you can avoid. Correct. Manage.”
“This is awfully analytic.”
“I’ve skipped over the hard parts, but they will be on the homework assignment.”
“Usually these kinds of talk use phrases like ‘optimally consolidated self.’ I’ve been waiting for the jargon to come trotting out.” He had finished the bowl and felt much better.
“Food is one of the life-affirming experiences.”
“So that’s why I do it.”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
“No, just working out the implications of the theory. I liked the part about hating unpredictability and fluctuations because they hurt people.”
“So can Empires, if they fall.”
“Right.” He finished the beer and thought about having another. Any more would dull him a little. He would prefer another way to take from him the edge he still felt.
“Big appetite.” She smiled.
“You have no idea. And the prospect of death can stimulate more than one kind of appetite. Let’s go back to that part about the homework assignment.”
“You have something in mind.”
He grinned. “You have no idea.”
4.
He savored his work all the more, since he had less time for it.
Hari sat in his darkened office, absolutely still, watching the 3D numerics evolve like luminous fogs in the air before him.
Empire scholars had known the root basics of psychohistory for millennia. In ancient times, pedants had charted the twenty-six stable and meta-stable social systems. There were plenty of devolved planets to study, fallen into barbarism-like the Porcos and their Raging Rituals, the Lizzies and their GynoGoverns.
He watched the familiar patterns form, as his simulation stepped through centuries of Galactic evolution. Some social systems proved stable only on small scales.
In the air hung the ranks of whole worlds, caught in stable Zones: Primitive Socialism; FemoPastoralism; Macho Tribalism. These were the “strong at tractors” of human sociology, islands in the chaos sea.
Some societies labored through their meta-stability, then crashed: Theocracy, Transcendentalism, Macho Feudalism. This latter appeared whenever people had metallurgy and agriculture. Planets which had slid a long way down the curve would manifest it.
Imperial scholars had long justified the Empire, threaded by narrow wormholes and lumbering hyperships, as the best human social structure. It had indeed proved stable and benevolent.
Their reigning model, Benign Imperial Feudalism, accepted that humans were hierarchical. As well, they were dynastically ambitious, liking the continuity of power and its pomp. They were quite devoted to symbols of unity, of Imperial grandeur. Gossip about the great was, for most people, the essence of history itself.
Imperial power was moderated by traditions of noble leadership, the assumed superiority of those who rose to greatness. Beneath such impressive resplendence, as Cleon well knew, lay the bedrock of an extremely honest, meritocratic civil service. Without that, corruption would spread like a stain across the stars, corroding the splendor.
He watched the diagram-a complex 3D web of surfaces, the landscape of social-space.